A couple of announcements from the entertainment world hit the wires this past week.

The long anticipated, talked about, delayed, postponed, suspended, whatever Abraham Lincoln project by producer Steven Spielberg was again in the news, this time with the announcement that Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis will play Abe. I’m not really sure how this film will be an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, because that book doesn’t read like a film. At all. I suspect that the purchase of the movie rights to the book, which was made prior to its publication, was more a PR move than anything else – an attempt to lend some gravitas to the effort. But I think Day-Lewis would be aces: the guy just doesn’t do anything badly. He’s the real deal. And the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum reported on Facebook that the actor and Goodwin toured the joint in Springfield this past Friday.

Elsewhere, word has it that the executive producer of the hit series Lost (Carlton Cuse) is working on a series set in Virginia during the Civil War. Not a lot of info on this yet, but it’s being described as an “event”. Whatever that means. Hopefully, it doesn’t mean that I’ll get really interested in it only to get turned off because I’m never sure if the episode that week will be a repeat, or even if the show will be on that week, or if I’ll have to wait until December for the season premier, or why the fat guy stays fat even after all the food in the Shenandoah Valley has been burned up by Sheridan. Start the damn show in September, run about 30 new episodes in a row and then repeat them over the spring and summer, just like Gilligan’s Island. And you can still get away with letting the fat guy stay fat.

Dulce bellum inexpertis

“I am sending you these little incidents as I hear them well authenticated. They form, to the friends of the parties, part of the history of the glorious 21st. More anon.”

About

Hello! I’m Harry Smeltzer and welcome to Bull Runnings, where you'll find my digital history project on the First Battle of Bull Run which is organized under the Bull Run Resources section. I'll also post my thoughts on the processes behind the project and commentary on the campaign, but pretty much all things Civil War are fair game. You'll only find musings on my “real job” or my personal life when they relate to this project. My mother always told me "never discuss politics or religion in mixed company”, and that's sound advice where current events are concerned.

The Project

This site is more than a blog. Bull Runnings also hosts digitized material pertaining to First Bull Run. In the Bull Run Resources link in the masthead and also listed below are links to Orders of Battle, After Action Reports, Official Correspondence, Biographical Sketches, Diaries, Letters, Memoirs, Newspaper Accounts and much, much more. Take some time to surf through the material. This is a work in process with no end in sight, so check back often!